Like many people, I have been waiting for the “perfect” one box solution to streaming recorded TV as well as movies and other video files to my television. To date, I have had to settle on a two box solution. I have been a Windows Media Center user for a couple of years now – I use a dual tuner card in my Windows Media Center 2005 box and have been using a Linksys Media Center Extender to stream recorded content to my TV upstairs.

One of the limitations in the Media Center Extender has always been that it can only stream files encoded in MPEG-2 and Windows Movie (WMV) formats. This is fine for some things, but neither format is the one that I use to archive my DVDs. MPEG-2 files are just too large and WMV files essentially suck. Now I know that there are some transcoding solutions out there that allow one to re-encode a file on the fly to WMV, but there are two issues with that. First of all, it puts a load on the machine doing transcoding and until recently, the machine I was using for my Media Center really couldn’t handle that. I have since upgraded to a dual-core AMD system, but I found that when I tried to play transcoded video, I lost the ability to fast forward and rewind.

To address this problem, I used a second box, A D-LINK DSM-520. This box did an adequate job – it was capable of playing both DIVX as well as the MPEG-4 files that Nero Recode created but it crashed periodically and the fast forward/rewind was very slow. It was way to easy to accidentally hit stop instead of pause in a darkened room mid way through a movie which meant that it might take 10 minutes of fast forwarding to get back to the point where you left off. Plus it was a second box, which was not ideal.

I really looked forward to the Xbox elite as I had a high definition television and figured I might as well wait to get the Xbox that has an HDMI output port. Another issue was that I planned to upgrade my Media Center to Vista which meant that my old Linksys extender would no longer work. At the present time, the Xbox 360 is the only media center extender that works with Vista. A happy coincidence was that a couple of weeks after I got my Xbox elite, Microsoft dropped the May dashboard update which among other features added the ability for the Xbox to play MP4 and H.264 files natively.

Now, I use Nero Recode to encode all of my movies. Nero is much faster and easier to use than my old Divx based DVD ripping program, DVDtoX’s #1DVD Ripper. Nero encodes into several formats including MP4 and H.264. After some trial and error, I figured out that the movies encoded using Nero’s H.264 format would play on the Xbox 360. Please see my post, “How to Encode Video The Easy Way Using Nero Recode” for details on the specific steps to produce the H.264 files. I now had video files that could play on the Xbox 360. The next step was to figure out how to get them there. I store all of my video files on a 1.6 GB NAS device, an Infrant ReadyNas. I wanted to be able to stream these to the Xbox and this presented some issues. I tried using Windows Media Player 11 as well as Nero’s Mediahome streaming server, but neither worked. After some searching on the Web, I stumbled upon Microsoft’s Zune Software Application. I set this up on my Media Center PC and it worked like a charm. Once I told the Zune application to look at the network shares where my movies and other video files were stored, the videos were added to the Zune library and I was good to go. Any H.264 file in the Zune library was viewable on my Xbox 360.

I did learn a couple of things. First of all, I could never get a regular MPEG-4 file to stream. I had to use the H.264 format. I found that I could stream videos that were on the Media Center’s hard disk using Windows Media Player 11’s streaming service, however, for some reason, I had to change the extension on the H.264 file from .MP4 to .WMV to get it to work. This was not an optimal solution. The Zune software recognizes the H.264 file using the regular .MP4 extension and works well with the Xbox 360. I don’t own a Zune player nor have any plans to get one, but the Zune software is specifically designed to stream to the Xbox 360 and works like a champ.